Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Drunk on the Heady Wine of Macron's Landslide the Deep State Takes Another Bite of the Trump Apple

Despite numerous placating gestures to the permanent government, Trump is back in its crosshairs. Trump's firing yesterday of FBI director James Comey, splashed all over the frontpage this morning, was prefigured Tuesday by prominent placement of Senate testimony by Sally Yates, former acting attorney general, of how she warned the Trump White House not to hire Mike Flynn.

For news consumers this reemergence of the "Siberian candidate" meme from the obscurity of the back pages should have set antenna tingling.

Another tell is this morning's Situation Report. Supposedly devoted exclusively to foreign policy matters, I try to read SitRep every morning because it provides a synopsis of the deep state hivemind. Stories that are omitted are stories that the permanent government would rather you not read. Stories given prominent placement are of course the stories that the permanent government wants us to ingest.

Interesting then that this morning the firing of a FBI director would lead a daily foreign policy synopsis (more to play up the Russian angle):

Comey sacked. President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, removing from office the veteran head of the agency tasked with carrying out a wide-ranging investigation into whether the president and his staffers conspired with Russian agents to swing the 2016 election in the Republican candidate’s favor. FP’s Elias Groll has more.

“Not since Watergate has a president dismissed the person leading an investigation bearing on him, and Mr. Trump’s decision late Tuesday afternoon drew instant comparisons to the “Saturday Night Massacre” in October 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the so-called third-rate burglary that would eventually bring Nixon down,” writes the New York Times’ Peter Baker.

Reports indicate the move came after Trump grew increasingly frustrated Comey wouldn’t publicly clear Trump’s name. Tensions had been building in the West Wing, with aides to the president tellingPolitico that Trump “had grown enraged by the Russia investigation...frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said.”

The move came as a surprise not only to the FBI and Capitol Hill, but also for White House staffers. And it led to calls from both Democrats and some top Republicans for an independent prosecutor to launch an investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

It was also revealed Tuesday by CNN that Federal prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas “to associates of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn seeking business records,” for transitions Flynn conducted after he was fired by president Obama from his positions as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Investigators have been looking into possible wrongdoing in how Flynn handled disclosures about payments from clients tied to foreign governments including Russia and Turkey.”

Trump has also recently hired a law firm to tell Senators that he has no business deals in Russia.

The deep state is feeling its oats. Macron, the only anti-Russian candidate of the major contenders in the French presidential election, won in a landslide. And it looks like the Western intelligence community was able to successfully perpetrate a false flag hack attack.

“If Macron manages to stop the populist tsunami, he’ll be rewarded by his European counterparts,” said Florence Gaub, a senior analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris. “He’ll be able to make some demands that other French presidents could not. Because everyone needs him to be a success, and if it stops with France, maybe it stops forever.”

This is purely delusional thinking. We know where Macron's neoliberal reforms lead. Look to Greece.

In any event, in these heady days the elite of the permanent government are going to take another bite at Trump apple.